Tuesday, January 11, 2005

New Thought

For the sake of this post, I’d like to ask everyone to—just for a moment—ignore your opinion on whether abortion should be legal and whether the Iraq War was justified.

Last week, I was watching the O’Reilly Factor (yes, I watch the O’Reilly Factor; Trey and Matt are vulgar and Bill’s a blowhard). As I was saying, I was watching the O’Reilly Factor and Bill was discussing a recent ruling by California Attorney General Bill Locklear, allowing a public school to release a student from class for medical reasons (including to have an abortion) without having to inform the student’s parents. Jerry Brown, the far-left former governor of California who was a guest on the show, commented:

"This is probably viewed differently in California than other parts of the country. If a woman's old enough to get pregnant, the right to privacy has to be protected."

Bill objected, saying that a pregnant 14-year old hardly qualifies as a woman. Now, compare Brown's statement with an oft-quotededitorial by William Rivers Pitt:

“Fahrenheit 9/11 is not a victory for anyone. We the People should have known better, We the People should have been given the facts before sending 851 of our children to die.”

Look, I was a ROTC cadet for three years before being released over an old knee injury, a rather fantastically stupid decision for the military, but a lucky break for me. Suffice to say (and to paraphrase Lileks), I could very easily mouth-off a number of epithets for those in the military—both positive and negative—but “child-like” just doesn’t come to mind.

The point of all this being that, according to the Left, we should assume a knocked-up eighth-grader to be a mature adult, capable of making her own decisions, while also presuming that a nineteen year-old PFC is, well, just a kid.

1 Comments:

If women have the right to create life and have their privacy protected, then it follows that they should have their right to take life and their privacy protected.

The problem is that abortion is such an emotive issue and people regard the taking of life in a different light than the giving of life. Women may also be ashamed [to differing degrees] about giving or taking life.

This cannot be dismissed by 'abortion is special/murder and therefore is different to pregnancy'. This is the exact argument - abortion's unique nature is acheived in the same manner as pregnancy's unique nature. How many men do you know that can have a baby? (Ok, bad question maybe)

To preserve consistency, privacy concerns should be identical between women who are pregnant and those having an abortion, not different.

I hope you're not fantastically disappointed at my comment, but I would agree - Jerry Brown would have to be wildly inconsistent to sustain his claim as it appears above.